Critical Comment: Edinburgh
In the next few weeks stacks of shows will make their way from the Edinburgh Fringe to London. Over-praised in the North, some will get cut down to size in the South. Others, often very good, will be critically ignored. So I have a radical suggestion to make. Why don’t more companies cut out the middleman, forsake expensive, inflated Edinburgh and open in London in August where, believe it or not, there is an audience hungry for theatre?
To me, the Edinburgh Fringe has become a bad joke (and there is no lack of those given the plethora of attention-seeking stand-ups). What started in 1947 as an alternative idea has turned into a capitalist institution – one dominated by a handful of big commercial venues outside which the weakest often go to the wall. And the search for quality becomes a needle-in-haystack job. Of the 1,600 shows on view at the Fringe this year, I would estimate the vast majority are rubbish and will leave their performers sadly out of pocket. Yet each year gullible innocents are lured to Edinburgh by the prospect of fame and fortune: it is the ultimate triumph of hype over experience.
If I attack the Fringe, it is because it has had a bad effect on the wider theatrical culture. In Edinburgh the big venues depend on a swift turn-around of shows to maximise profits. Hence the insidious growth of the 60-minute show, a form that favours comedians, solo performers or one-act playlets. It wasn’t always thus. I recall a time when the Fringe could premiere a play like Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall (then called Disciplines of War) or Deborah Warner could stage a full-text King Lear. Neither in today’s soundbite culture would be a possibility.
The Fringe has also encouraged a perversion of language and critical values. The accepted wisdom is that the Fringe is “populist”, the International Festival “stuffy” and “elitist.” Yet, in one heady day at Edinburgh this year, I sat with 2,000 theatregoers watching the Pennsylvania Ballet’s highly enjoyable Swan Lake and with an equally diverse throng at La Cubana’s subversively funny Nuts Coconuts. This is what one colleague loftily calls the “stodge” of the International Festival. But what could be more elitist than some Fringe vanity production playing to a dozen punters or a company called Signal to Noise who perform to order in your flat?
Of course, if you hunt hard enough, there is good work on the Fringe – but a surprising amount of it has already been pre-booked for a London run as soon as the Fringe circus leaves town. So why go to all the strain and expense of what is, in effect, an out-of-town tryout? One answer is that you get early reviews; the negative side of that is that national papers often ignore you when you come to London. The real truth, I suspect, is that the Fringe has become what Time Out years ago dubbed “a works outing for London’s theatre folk”. But, even if an excursion to Edinburgh increases your chances of getting laid or blind-drunk, it seems a long way to go for the pleasure.
I’d argue that, despite the holiday season, there is a captive audience in London in August avid for entertainment. And I can vouch for this by two shows I saw recently that were both vastly superior to anything on the Edinburgh Fringe and that were packed to the rafters even on warm, metropolitan nights.
The first was Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound at the Sound Theatre off Leicester Square. Conventional wisdom would say it was madness to stage a rare Greek tragedy in a 200-seat theatre in the capital in August. Yet two young producers of the kind London theatre desperately needs, Holly Kendrick and Chris Perkin, had the courage of their convictions. The result was that an audience sat raptly attentive watching the astonishing David Oyelowo suffering heroically as Aeschylus’s manacled hero. In its image of resistance to tyranny, James Kerr’s production even brought Nelson Mandela to mind.
The next night I went off to the Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court to see Joy Wilkinson’s Fair, a fascinating new play about two young people, a BNP racist thug and a solitary female student, locked into an intense relationship in a northern English town. This was a play that had something important to say about the battle between sentimental nationalism and outward-looking multi-culturalism. And, once again, the tiny theatre was packed.
It’s high time to puncture the idea that Edinburgh is inevitably where it’s at in August. Let the students and the sad stand-ups sweat it out in Auld Reekie if they wish. But London does not shut up shop in late summer. I would simply say to the best performers and directors, hooked on the Scotch myth and already dreaming of next year: “Is your journey really necessary?”
